Perpetual Inventory (review)

Perpetual Inventory by Rosalind E. Krauss is a collection of essays that spans three decades. The title comes from Krauss's view that her job as an art critic requires that she take a perpetual inventory of what artists make and do, constantly revising her ideas about the direction and significance of the work she critiques. I am not sure the book successfully showcases this effort, however.

In her introduction, for example, Krauss writes that this anthology considers what she calls the post-medium condition. She says that while Jean-François Lyotard argued that the postmodern condition is characterized by the end of a "master narrative," Krauss sees in the post-medium condition of contemporary art a similar coherence. She writes:

For the most part, Perpetual Inventory charts my conviction as a critic that the abandonment of the specific medium spells the death of serious art . . . the artists I observed persevering in the service of a medium had abandoned traditional supports in favor of strange new apparatuses . . . calling such things "technical supports" would, I thought, allay the confusion of the use of "medium," too ideologically associated as the term is with outmoded tradition

(p. xiii).

In other words, since contemporary artists are often not medium specific, looking at art practices requires a broader framework than the traditional medium-specific approaches of painting, sculpture or whatever. As she puts in her essay "A View of Modernism," first published in ArtForum 11 (September 1972):

[M]odernist critics appear to have cut themselves off from what is most energetic and felt in contemporary sculpture. Their inability to deal with Richard Serra, or Michael Heizer, or Keith Sonnier, or Robert Smithson is anomalous in the extreme. Further, these critics have continually balked at admitting film to the status of a "modernist art." Given the quality of recent advanced film, this position is simply no longer admissible even for critics who confine themselves to dealing just with painting and sculpture, for film as a medium has become increasingly important to sculptors themselves; Serra and Sonnier are only the most obvious examples

(p. 126).

As I read Perpetual Inventory I found the recent essays significantly more enticing than many of the older ones, particularly her discussions of William Kentridge's exploration of cinematic animation and Christian Marclay's "Lip Sync: Marclay Not Nauman." The "Lip Sync" article, first published in October (No. 116, Spring 2006), focuses on Marclay's Video Quartet (2002), an extraordinary work composed of a sampling of more than 700 Hollywood films that draw the viewer in immediately. To my mind, lip-syncing isn't really the focus of Marclay's work, which edits segments of films together using movements and sound to create tantalizing connections. Krauss's point is that Marclay's efforts build on a history. Earlier filmmaker efforts to sync sound with lip movement are also well known. More recently, Bruce Nauman's classic piece Lip Sync (1969) alluded to this technological development in terms of video. Nauman held the camera upside down and focused on a close-up of his mouth with his lips and tongue articulating the words "lip sync" as the audio track shifted in and out of sync with the video. Marclay's statement, by way of contrast, offers more of an insinuation of synchronization than an articulation of it, developed through using hands on keyboards, men and women singing, dancing and noises to create the visual and sonic collage that unfolds on four projection screens.

Krauss suggests that Marclay's sense of synchronicity, which we feel more than perceive, is an expression of how an artist today blends tools and styles. Her larger point is that contemporary artworks are layered mechanisms that show a unitary organization of an unfolding narrative. Those who know this work would understand that it feels like a unified piece despite the layers of its complexity. Yet, as is often the case with Krauss's essays, I am not sure that her commentary on Video Quartet will translate...